meridionalHeatTransport

An analysis task for plotting the zonal mean meridional heat transport (MHT) against observations.

Component and Tags:

component: ocean
tags: climatology, publicObs

Configuration Options

The following configuration options are available for this task:

[meridionalHeatTransport]
## options related to plotting meridional heat transport (MHT)

# Data source to read for comparison
observationData = mht_TrenberthCaron.NoAtm_20180710.nc

# colormap for model results
colormapName = balance
# colormap indices for contour color
colormapIndices = [0, 28, 57, 85, 113, 142, 170, 198, 227, 255]
# colorbar levels/values for contour boundaries
colorbarLevels = [-0.1, -0.05, -0.02, -0.01, -0.005, 0, 0.005, 0.01, 0.02,
                  0.05, 0.1]
# contour line levels
contourLevels = [-0.1, -0.01, 0.01, 0.1]

# latitude and depth limits
xLimGlobal = [-80, 80]
depthLimGlobal = [-1000, 0]

# compare to observations?
compareWithObservations = True

# plot the vertical section of MHT?
plotVerticalSection = False

# Number of points over which to compute moving average (with respect to
# latitude) for MHT vertical section plots
movingAveragePoints = 1

The option observationData allows the selection of the observational file to compare with (available largely for debugging purposes).

By default, only a line plot of depth-integrated MHT is plotted. Optionally, you can set plotVerticalSection = True to produce a plot of the MHT per unit depth as a funciton of latitude and depth. Because this type of plot is not commonly produced in ocean models and observations are not available for comparison, it is disabled by default.

The options xLimGlobal and depthLimGlobal control the bounds of the x axis of both plots and the y axis of the vertical section plot, respectively.

For more details on the remaining configuration options, see:

Example Result

../_images/mht.png